Wednesday, February 6, 2013

OR Bill would allow ranchers to kill wolves attacking livestock

Posted: Tuesday, February 05, 2013

SALEM -- The Oregon Department of
Fish and Wildlife is seeking to allow ranchers to kill wolves when they
catch a wolf in the act of killing livestock.

Senate Bill 197, which has been assigned the Senate Environment and
Natural Resources Committee, would give the state authority to allow
what is known as permit-less take when the state's wolf population
reaches four breeding pair for three consecutive years.

"We're basically two years away from that," said Curt Melcher, deputy
director of the department. "We had five or six confirmed breeding pair
last year."

To date, ranchers must be in possession of a kill permit before they can take a wolf caught killing livestock.

Kill permits are issued only after several nonlethal steps are taken
to prevent depredation, and only after a rancher has suffered
depredation.

The bill is the third and final piece of legislation needed to fully
implement the state's Wolf Conservation and Management Plan, Melcher
said.

The first two pieces, one creating a compensation fund for ranchers
who suffer livestock losses from wolf depredation, and one to change the
status of the gray wolf from a protected to a game mammal, already have
been adopted, Melcher said.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone